All Your Base Are Belong To Us

October 22, 2015

This is my second TechDays this year–I’ve had the pleasure of visiting the Netherlands and now also Sweden to speak at TechDays on a variety of topics. Both events had quite a special atmosphere with a lot of activity, a lot more session slots than usual at software conferences, and a great selection of international speakers (except for your humble servant, of course). Even though most talks were in languages I don’t understand, I really enjoyed my time.

But I’m guessing you’re here because you want to put your hands on materials from my two talks–so here they are, without further ado. I’ll just say that my next conference appearances are currently scheduled for Visual Studio Live! Orlando (two talks), BuildStuff Lithuania (a workshop), and BuildStuff Ukraine (two talks) in the week of November 19-23. If you’re going to be at or around these events, please say hi!

This talk, revised considerably from the first time I delivered it in 2014, covered a bunch of random new features in Visual Studio 2015 that I personally find most valuable. Because Visual Studio 2015 was a huge product release, there’s no way for a single session to cover every new feature, which is why I feel perfectly fine with just talking about the stuff I care about. Specifically, I care about the following–in no particular order:

I really like the direction Visual Studio is heading, and look forward to this year’s MVP Summit (coming up in just a couple of weeks) to learn more about the future and influence the product. If you have any thoughts, please feel free to sound them off in the comments or get in touch on Twitter.

This talk was more on the philosophical side, and touched on .NET Core, which was released as a fully open-source project less than a year ago. Despite its young age, .NET Core is showing very promising signs of being adopted by the developer community on GitHub, who proposed a large number of valuable pull requests, some of which were already merged. I tried to answer the more common questions people tend to have about CoreFX, CoreCLR, and their relationship to Roslyn and ASP.NET 5, and also spice up the presentation with a couple of demos showing how to build and run .NET apps on OS X under CoreCLR, and how to make an actual change to the .NET Framework and run your code with the custom modified version.

You can follow some of my shorter musings on Twitter — @goldshtn. I also link to all my blog posts and reply to comments there.